And what next?

What constitutes a tumultous life?
Too much of a good thing, taken away?

I fell in love with a dark haired boy when I was 16. His name was Albert, and I thought I would spend the rest of my life with him in a giant house. Our children would run around the countryside and we would make our own wine.
Summer would mean rich afternoons, late lunches and dozing in the shade, intoxicated by the heat, our happiness. Winter would mean a fireplace, roaring as we sat silently in mis-matched chairs, the melting sky darkening, the smell of roast dinners calling our children home.

My teenage years consisted of dreaming with him. In our world we had conversations without words, love without concern, happiness without reason.

That was before the war.
He was always so brave. Nothing I could say would stop him from going. His eyes held that steely determindness that he accused me of having. With the first wave of troops, my grasp on him slipped.
A week after he left I found a letter he wrote to me. Explaining how he could not live with himself if the chaos of those countries came to me. He would stand guard over our life, over our future. Over me.

I stood tall. To those who scorned the soldiers, I spoke with ice. I walked, I lived with a pride based in hope, that hope built on the conviction that he had to come back to me. Whether delirium or solid faith, I held onto that inconsistent, intangible future. I could not hold his hand, so I grasped at possibility.
Alone, I would crouch against a wall, arms wrapped around myself. How I wished I could breathe the same air as he. The air of freedom. The air that had not been touched by chaos, by the greed of man, by the desire for power. The air that our children would breathe.

I was born two minutes after midnight on the 5th of July.

Sometimes I wonder if that ever changed anything. Whether if I had been born a minute later, three minutes earlier, things would have been different.
I guess I'll never know.

They say that if you're born during a storm you're destined to live a tumultous life. That July we had one of the most violent storms in five years.
'You know, you've never really had anything interesting happen to you. I'm not sure that saying is even true.' He had said to me, eyes glittering.
I protested for the sake of protesting, but inside I wondered. Silently I hoped that he was right, that it wasn't true. If it was, as long as he was with me, I would not care.

It's funny how experience makies you think differently about things. Convictions you once held so tightly to your heart become dusty, things you believed in with all your heart begin to crack under pressure.
The errosion of time makes you question those things.

And after that, what next?